A senior Liberal has quit the party just a week after attending a One Nation fundraiser in Melbourne, saying it was “insipid” and no longer worth defending.
Former candidate Colleen Harkin resigned her membership in an email on Sunday, while federal president Tony Abbott has been hitting the phones to try to stop a flood of defections to Pauline Hanson’s party.
The ex-prime minister has personally been making calls to members after half of the party’s Curl Curl branch on Sydney’s Northern Beaches left to join One Nation, and the Bay and Basin branch on the South Coast also suffered multiple losses.
The Curl Curl members tried to dissolve the whole branch but were prevented from doing so by the party’s constitution, and some told The Sunday Telegraph they left because the Liberal Party was “losing its way”, “failing to get rid of the left”, or “no longer representing my values”.
One confirmed they had been personally contacted by Mr Abbott, who told them One Nation was “run more as a corporation than a democracy” and said the “grass was not always greener”.
A former member from Gilmore on the South Coast said One Nation had 500 members to the Liberals’ 220 in the region, and many had left because the party was infested with wokeness.
“We have all these left elements in the party. We are a conservative party and that’s what One Nation offers,” they said.
Ms Harkin made similar comments in her resignation letter, writing: “I have not changed. The Party has.”
“I cannot continue to support an organisation that has lost sight of its principles, its purpose and its responsibilities to its own members. I hereby resign my membership of the Liberal party,” she wrote.
“I have the greatest respect for Presidents Tony Abbott and Brian Loughnane. However, their executive leadership cannot compensate for a party shaped by the Machiavellian factionalism, expediency and a lack of policy conviction that has seen the party brought to its insipid state.”
Ms Harkin was among five members of the Victorian state executive who tried to block the Liberal Party from loaning former leader John Pesutto $1.55 million so he could pay off a debt after losing a defamation case against MP Moira Deeming, and she said in her letter the case would continue without her.
On Friday she told ABC Radio she had attended the One Nation fundraiser, where far-left extremists hurled abuse and called for the death of Pauline Hanson, and was impressed by the other attendees.
“When we’ve had these conversations here about a presumption of people who have lower socio-economic class or a lack of academic qualifications as One Nation supporters. It was not what was in the room,” she said.
“A lot of people I spoke with had not really been politically engaged before and were just concerned about the direction of the country and the tenor of the country.”
Header image: Left, Colleen Larkin (Facebook). Right, Tony Abbott in a photo he posted last week paying tribute to Indian PM Narendra Modi (Facebook).
The post Top Liberal quits as Tony Abbott hits phones to stop One Nation defections first appeared on The Noticer.
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